the issue almost certainly helped president obama and did not hurt president obama. the lesson is not lost on the republican party. here are my concluding thoughts. it is a complicated history to were the long road of marriage equality, the beginning is a complicated answer about backlash and the popular analysis of what is going on politically. what i want to conclude with, this has been neglected by the backlash theorists, how the courts have advanced marriage equality. i think there have been three things about what the courts have done. from my point of view, the most important is a fantastically important setting for capabilities. the word marriage in our vocabulary only meant different sects. after they linguistically, the notion of same-sex marriage entered our vocabulary and is now no longer in quote marks. courts are capable of reversing the burden of political inertia as well as giving publicity to an issue and putting it on the public agenda. and in massachusetts, the first state to recognize marriage equality even though it was for a fraction of the peopl